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Thursday 16 January 2025
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for the masthead; here for Acknowledgments; here for the FAQ; here for advice on citations. Find entries via the search box above (more details here) or browse the menu categories in the grey bar at the top of this page.
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Yugoslavia
The entry, written for the second edition of the encyclopedia, awaits updating and linking to further new entries covering the development of sf in the various post-1992 successor states such as Croatia. / Yugoslavia was established as a nation in 1918, but the first sf works in two of its three linguistic areas – the Serbocroat and the Slovenian – long predated that. The first sf book to appear in Serbocroat was the translation in 1873 of Jules ...
Bernal, J D
(1901-1971) UK physicist and political philosopher, Marxist polemicist, whose The World, the Flesh and the Devil: An Enquiry into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul (1929 chap) manages, with astonishing clarity and concision, to provide models for the understanding and exploitation of the future that sf writers – some knowingly, some ignorant of this small work – would mine for decades. Its influence was acknowledged by Olaf ...
Firefly
US tv series (2002). Mutant Enemy for 20th Century Fox Television. Created by Joss Whedon. Producers include Whedon, Tim Minear, and Ben Edlund. Directors include Whedon, Minear, and Vern Gillum. Writers include Whedon, Minear, Edlund, Jose Molina, and Jane Espenson. Cast includes Nathan Fillion as Malcolm Reynolds, Gina Torres as Zoe Washburn, Alan Tudyk as Hoban "Wash" Washburn, Jewel Staite as Kaylee Frye, Adam Baldwin as Jayne Cobb, Morena Baccarin as ...
Lalumière, Claude
(1966- ) Canadian editor and author, who writes in English, beginning with "Bestial Acts" for Interzone in April 2002, and much of whose best work has been assembled in Objects of Worship (coll 2009); the most evocative of his stories evoke – often simultaneously, with the ruthless opportunism fortunately prevalent among younger writers of the twenty-first century – sf, fantasy and horror modes in powerfully ...
Volk, Gordon
(1885-?1962) UK author who also wrote as by Raymond Knotts, in active service during World War One; he specialized almost exclusively in crime adventures without fantastic elements, with the exception of The Isle of Men (1932), a Lost Race tale set on a South Pacific Island where a race of physically superior humans is discovered. [JC]
Clute, John
(1940- ) Canadian critic, editor and author, in the UK from 1969; married to Judith Clute from 1964, partner of Elizabeth Hand since 1996. He began to publish work of genre interest with an sf-tinged poem "Carcajou Lament" in Triquarterly for Winter 1960 [ie Autumn 1959]; he began consistently publishing sf reviews in his "New Fiction" column for the Toronto Star (1966-1967), and later in ...